But part of what makes me an extreme non-credentialist is that if I spend an hour watching someone with a nutrition Ph.D. debate a completely self-taught person, and the Ph.D. is making bad arguments and pointing to weak evidence, and the self-taught person is making very solid arguments and pointing to strong evidence and has a very solid command of the relevant facts, the fact that the first person has a Ph.D. will be nearly completely washed out for me at that point, and I will trust the second person’s view of nutrition far more based on the quality of their thinking and the reasons underlying why they believe what they do.

So, being a non-credentialist to me isn’t about thinking that credentials are meaningless, but rather, it involves being willing to quickly update away from the evidence of a credential once you have more direct evidence about the way a person comes to conclusions and what they know.

Most Ph.D.s in a subject are vastly more reliable sources of information on that subject than most non-Ph.D.s on that same subject, but there are lots of exceptions, and sometimes self-taught people are absolutely world-class (and, in any human endeavor, plenty of people with fancy credentials are actually full of B.S.)

Another thing that makes me a non-credentialist is that I love to see highly credible, highly knowledgeable, self-taught people discussing topics and spreading their ideas (whereas some people are very much rubbed the wrong way when someone is talking publicly about a topic they lack a credential in).

An important note: when there is a strong scientific consensus, that is usually a strong starting point for beliefs on topics you know little about (e.g., in physics or biology), even though the consensus is not always right. But trusting the scientific consensus is not the same as trusting one person due to their credentials – a strong scientific consensus is typically more reliable than individual experts.

If you’d like to figure out how much of a credentialist or non-credentialist you are, you can take our credentialist test here.

This piece was first written on February 28, 2024, and first appeared on my website on March 22, 2024.

After noticing a number of times that people’s feelings about formal credentials can differ dramatically and that this seems to impact their views on certain important topics, I’ve been working on defining a “credentialist” trait (or attitude).

In a nutshell, the non-credentialist/credentialist spectrum, as I’m defining it, captures how important a person thinks formal credentials are, as well as how they feel those credentials should influence who we should trust and who should express opinions (e.g., should only formalized experts comment on a topic, or is it good for non-experts to comment as well?)

I developed a 4-minute test to measure the trait, so if you’d like to find out if you are a “credentialist” or “non-credentialist” (which I define as being in the top or bottom 20th percentile of each trait) or find out your own credentialist score, you can take the test here:

https://programs.clearerthinking.org/credentialist_test.html

Here are simplified/extreme prototypes to illustrate the distinction (few people are as extreme as these prototypes):

*Credentialists* get annoyed when someone without the right credential is giving their opinion on a topic, are impressed by formal degrees (e.g. PhDs and MDs), do not like it when non-experts have their own personal theory about a topic, trust people a lot more when they have formal credentials, think its unlikely someone could get really good at a complex topic without formal training, think that non-experts should not contradict experts, would go to school to learn a topic if they wanted to get good at it, find it annoying if startup founders talk about disrupting industries they have not already worked in, tend to describe people in terms of their schooling and job history (rather than, for example, their personality), and trust the opinion’s of people a lot more if they went to an excellent college.

*Non-credentialists* think that it fine (or even good) to express opinions when you’re a non-expert, are not particularly impressed by formal degrees, don’t view degrees or certifications as a strong indicator of trust, think it’s fine (or even good) for non-experts to criticize the views of experts, are prone to teach themselves material rather than going to school for it, don’t mind startup founders attempting to disrupt industries from the outside, tend not to describe people in terms of their schooling and job history, and don’t view the quality of the college a person went to as a significant factor in whether to trust their opinions.

I measured the trait on a 0 to 1 scale, and on the 143 people I collected it for, it has a mean of 0.55 and a standard deviation of 0.16, with a pretty nice bell curve shape.

Interestingly, I found a very low correlation between credentialist scores and education [r=0.03], identifying as female [r=-0.04], and income [r=0.03], and little correlation with age [r=-.08]. This suggests that credentialist differences have little to do with demographic characteristics!

Furthermore, whether you are a credentialist does not even seem to have that much to do with whether you yourself have credentials, as responses to the question “I myself have substantial formal credentials” had a correlation of only about r=0.13 with the credentialist scores. It also has little to do with how ambitious people are, as responses to “I have highly ambitious goals for what I will achieve in my life” had a correlation of only r=0.07 to credentialist scores.

Of the 22 questions I tested people’s agreement on in order to measure the trait, the 2 most effective questions (in the sense that they correlate highly with the average of the other questions but don’t correlate very highly with each other) are:

Q1: It annoys me when someone without the right credential is giving their opinion on a topic (e.g., a non-doctor commenting about medicine or a non-accountant commenting on accounting)

[r=0.71 against the average of the other 21 questions]

and

Q2: I am very impressed by formal degrees (e.g., PhDs, MDs, JDs, etc.)

[r=0.54 against the average of the other 21 questions, yet a fairly low r=0.24 with respect to Q1]

The 22 questions I developed hang together nicely and point in generally the same direction. Basic factor analysis revealed only one main factor in the questions, and the question least correlated to the others still had a positive correlation of r=0.34 with the average of the other questions (which was “If I heard that someone had won a prize in their field, I would think very highly of it”).

Most people fall in the middle of this trait, of course (e.g., viewing credentials as at least somewhat positive but the lack of them not that negative), without an extreme viewpoint either way. However, here are some anonymized qualitative responses I collected from people at the tail ends of the spectrum:

Credentialists:

“I don’t respect people who don’t have formal credentials, and one of my biggest pet peeves is people–even really intelligent people–speaking about things they aren’t experts on. Just because someone is known, or even renowned in another field, doesn’t place their opinion on another topic anywhere above another non-educated person.”

“People with formal credentials have generally gone through a rigorous peer review process that demands a considerable depth of understanding and knowledge.”

“People who don’t have credentials have no business talking about things they know nothing about. That’s how misinformation gets spread, and misinformation is harmful to society as a whole.”

Non-credentialists:

“I think that people can have a valid voice no matter their level of formal schooling. The opposite also holds true: a degree is not necessarily representative of ability.”

“I feel that colleges have become scams. They are money sponges that make you pay for your own brainwashing. I value intelligence and how well-read someone is on a subject, and we don’t need a self-appointed team of left-wing experts to ‘allow’ us to do that for ourselves anymore. People with credentials have more money than sense and have been taught what NOT to think more than they have been taught HOW to think.”

“While I respect those who have worked to earn professional credentials, people who are self-taught oftentimes know much more about a subject than someone with an expensive degree.”

Note: designing this scale and writing this post is a very non-credentialist thing to do since I’m not a social scientist.

This piece was first written on July 21, 2017, and first appeared on my website on June 10, 2025.